The Dining Room

By A. R. Gurney, Jr.

The big deal in the show is you have to have the real stuff if the audience is 3 feet away. About the only difference in the final version was the stage floated rather than had steps up to it. I was really working through my fragmented scenery ideas, trying to meld several architectural styles to communicate the idea of a dining room through history. The wallpaper is painted. The parquet is constructed from painted masonite pieces.

I had done a perspective pencil sketch rapidly and thought it came out well enough for color. I think I just used liquid concentrated watercolor and maybe some inks.

The director thought that this was such a light build we should make this into a "museum of rooms". I designed, and we built and furnished and lit three other rooms around the stage. We also built new seating risers and divided the audience in two groups instead of our usual three. The new units achieved better sightlines, but were so labor intensive we didn't use them again.